Indeed - I have had this very thing happen. An old car of mine would occasionally send up a wisp of foul smelling smoke from behind the bulkhead and up inside the windscreen. I thought it was a wire occasionally shorting out and burning off insulation (it smelled like burning PVC), but it turned out to be a leaky heater matrix. I bypassed the matrix with a bit of straight pipe and topped up the coolant until I could summon the strength to perform a horrendous matrix swap operation, and the car ran fine for a few hundred miles until the engine blew. I guess I found the fault too late, and by then the damage had been done - probably an air pocket causing the block or head to locally overheat and warp.
Well tow truck drivers aren’t mechanics. In this case the tow truck driver may have said he thought it was a head gasket, but really the only reason for a tow driver to “diagnose” a problem is to put the vehicle into one of two categories. Things he can fix, (flat fix, gas, jump start) and things he cannot. (Everything else) If the vehicle requires a simple fix he fixes it. If not, he tows it. A more in depth diagnosis is not required.
Kip Addotta
Wet Dream
*It was April the 41st, being a quadruple leap year
I was driving in downtown Atlantis
My Barracuda was in the shop, so I was in a rented Stingray, and it was
overheating
So I pulled into a Shell station
They said I’d blown a seal
I said, “Fix the damn thing and leave my private life out of it, okay
pal?”
*
It’s been over 20 years since I used to work on cars, but back then there was no way to predict a head gasket failure because, well, under normal circumstances a head gasket was good for the life of the engine. In 100% of the cases I worked on the head gasket *always *failed because the car was significantly overheated.
An engine block is made of steel but the cylinder head is aluminum. Steel & aluminum expand at different rates. Under normal operating temps this isn’t a problem but if overheated the different expansion rates will cause enough of a difference in the tolerances between the head and block to allow the head gasket to fail.